Yilong Liu is a Chinese-born playwright who writes plays in English. Michael Leibenluft is an Obie-winning, American-born director who directs in Chinese. Together, they’ve been working on the New York premiere of Liu’s play, June is the First Fall in a production by Yangtze Repertory
through sharing, repeating, layering, and rephrasing, the company finds a way to both underline and subvert the brutality without explicitly pointing at it.
This is best drag: rooted by a simple movement vocabulary elevated with full design elements embodied by a queer figure in complete control of her material.
Since it’s often hard to explain a good piece of theater – as Milo Rau’s Five Easy Pieces, which had its all-too-brief North American premier two weeks ago at the Skirball Center, certainly was – we might as well start with everything this show is
It’s not so much a communing with the dead as an un-containing of the self, casting meaning into the void, hoping perhaps to receive some echo of that meaning back, in the shape of a hug, or song, or strip of tin foil torn from the wall.
Feminist philosopher Grosz asks: “How can we understand space differently, in order to organize, inhabit, and structure our living arrangements differently?” Dirks-Goodman takes this as provocation for her homespun meal and her other, more intangible, offerings.
When it comes to representation, the question of whose vantage point is accepted as the default. Whose story reads as universal?
A very telling moment occurs right at the top of American Juggalo, a new play produced by collective Unattended Baggage, at HERE Arts Center that closed March 3. After a projected slideshow introduces us in the briefest possible way to the Insane Clown Posse, Juggalos,
“Ain’t Too Proud” is more than just a jukebox musical.
We are constantly delighting each other with things and discoveries and even in scenes where the characters are brutal and cruel beyond imagination to each other—as soon as we get out of character, everyone is so full of laughter and joy.
I once described Little Lord shows like a rollercoaster. At the end we want you to realize how far you’ve been, how far you’ve traveled, even if you were just sitting still in your seat.
John Gutierrez writes from inside “This Bridge Called My Ass” from Miguel Gutierrez